Meet 4 New Age Superstar Indian (Business) Models

StalkBuyLove – The supply chain tech fashion company

Tushar Ahluwalia, Cofounder of StalkBuyLove said, “I think the one single most underestimated Indian KPI that people tend to overlook is the Indian basket size. A few years back the basket size was about 22 dollars’ (around 1300 rupees) worth of goods. This creates a lot of pressure for the P&L. Even if you have 35 percent profit margin, the other ecosystems just don’t care because the basket size is so small and the gross profit and absolute value is not hat high.

The concept here is really supply chain. I don’t define StalkBuyLove as an ecommerce company, we just happen to sell fashion on an online channel. But really the magic happens in the supply chain and it affects a lot of things – business operation, product quality, inventory allocations, and our margins. It affects each point of P&L. We are very excited about the business and the three things we look at are margin, marketing, and inventory of beautiful clothes.

However India has great returns on inventory costs that’s why we can have highly profitable businesses here. We don’t have a zero inventory model but StalkBuyLove has a super fast inventory model. We try to rotate our inventory super, super fast, and try to generate a really high return on our inventory. We do this by fulfilling orders ‘just in time’. We first let the customer decide which products are selling and which are not. Once the customer insight on this is analysed we will purchase the orders, allocate inventory very quickly for the right products, and there by fulfil customer purchases just in time.

Another point that helped me make build a successful business model in fashion was that I was fortunate to have grown up in a fashion family.

AgroStar - The mobile commerce (mcommerce) space dedicated to credit deprived farmers

Shardul Sheth, Promoter and Director of AgroStar said, “It’s true that we are not the traditional ecommerce startup. The idea for AgroStar came about 4 years ago. We started by building a tech product for farmers in the agri space because traditional agro businesses were fairly complex and complicated. We realized the farmer weren’t getting good services or products.

I had spent about 7 years in the US and worked at Best Buy, it’s one of the largest electronics retailers. It was all about service, brand and the customer. Then Amazon happened there and a similar situation as is happening here with Flipkart and Amazon occurred. So moved back to India and then worked on this product in the agro space. Now we realize that knowing the principles of ecommerce was be an advantage to us as we try to make an impact in a different space like agro. We wanted to change how the farmer buys some of the most important products they need in turn to grow good quality produce. The idea here is that rather than the farmer going to the nearest retailer to buy the products they need, we wanted to make these products available to them at their door step.

The challenge at that point was they didn’t have any type of credit or stock to borrow from our website. That’s how we came up with the idea to build mcommerce over a missed call. We made it very simple for the farmer to call us and get some of the basic essential agro products to their door.

Also at this point, amazingly enough, 50 percent of our farmers order through WhatsApp.

Flyrobe – The rental business that yield higher profits than retailing

Shreya Mishra, Cofounder of Flyrobe said, “Globally there are several rental companies some out of the US and in the fashion space that have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. They have been inventory led. They will buy stocks from designers and brands then rent it out. It’s good for profits but requires massive working capital to be able to function.

For us the biggest motivation was that we did not want to have a lot of our capital locked in inventory. So we used a different route. We have about 100 designers on Flyrobe and most of them are on a market place model. These designers make the clothes, give them to Flyrobe, which Flyrobe rents out. On every rented piece Flyrobe will make a share. What’s interesting is that through our business model the designer can actually make a lot more money than even the retail price because the same product will be rented several times. As opposed selling on Amazon of which the ecomm company will take a flat 20 to 40 percent cut.

A 100 to 120 percent return on a piece of clothing is a great return for our designers.

LifCare – The healthtech company that sells medicine online to digital immigrants (They will be announcing a round of funding soon we hear)

Karan Killa, Cofounder of LifCare said, “Since we largely cater to individuals over the age of 40, the chances of our customers going online to order their medical prescription are very low. So for us, it was important to be present across different channels. Then over time we can use that technology to convert these people on to more tech driven platforms.

So far we have been able to sustain a lot of this audience online but the key here is to use technology in such a way that the customer experience is richly impacted and not act as a barrier or block to on boarding them. I would say innovations like linking of our apps, the bigger font sizes, keeping the procedure to a simple 3 steps, and our next making move to make our app multi lingual is all done keeping our target audience in mind. We remember that it’s about providing a positive customer experience using technology rather than using technology as a promoting factor to use our platform.